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Tuesday, 12 February 2013

So, you might've seen that the official Raspbmc release is out. Up until now I've been using Raspbmc RC5 (release candidate 5). Following a lot of hard work the guys over as Raspbmc have reached a point where they have a stable, feature-rich version based on XMBC 12. And so they've released Raspbmc v1.0.

Tuesday, 5 February 2013

So – I’ve had a week or two to play around with Raspbmc and thought I’d give some feedback. Overall impression? Damn good! I’m trying hard to not sound over-zealous about it, but I’m very happy with what I’ve seen so far. I’ve got my all my media loaded, I can control it with my TV remote & Android phone, it’s stable and slick.

Tuesday, 22 January 2013

OK – so here we are. I have my Pi. I have a working wireless connection. What should I do? Well, the answer to that has been screaming in the back of my mind ever since I heard about this brilliant bit of kit. That’s right – it’s Media Centre time!

So, I’ve started with Raspbmc. I can honestly say that I’m VERY impressed. The majority of stuff just works. And works well. My Pi’s been running for about 24 hours now, idling at about 15% CPU. I can switch over at any time, it responds immediately, lets me control it using my Android phone – hell, it even lets me use my SAMSUNG TV REMOTE to control it. And at the risk of repeating myself – it all just works.

This is what it looks like:

And this is how I did it.NOTE: YOU'LL SEE THAT THE ABOVE LINK WILL TAKE YOU TO WWW.MYRASPBERRYPIEXPERIENCE.COM. I'M MOVING TO A DEDICATED DOMAIN - YOU'LL BE ABLE TO FIND ALL PREVIOUS CONTENT THERE, ALONG WITH NEW POSTS.

Saturday, 19 January 2013

So I’ve been threatening to do this for quite some time now. I finally got wireless working on my Pi. This will hopefully unlock all sorts functionality, most noticeably a small, quiet local media centre, streaming media from a server.

As I did this on a spur of the moment decision, I went down to my local Maplin today and bought a wireless card from there. They sell a Pi bundle, so I decided to just go for the card they include in that. It’s sold as a “N150 Nano Wi-Di USB Dongle”, and is Maplin-branded. £9.99, and hopefully working out the box:http://www.maplin.co.uk/n150-nano-usb-wireless-adapter-681507

And this is what it looks like (excuse the poor photo – I’m sharing an SD card with my camera at the moment):

The good news? I plugged it in, booted it up, and everything just worked. It couldn’t possibly have been easier! For the few steps I DID take, have a look here. What next I hear you ask? How about you take a stab at getting Raspbmc up and running for a brilliant media centre - take a look here.

NOTE: YOU'LL SEE THAT THE ABOVE LINK WILL TAKE YOU TO WWW.MYRASPBERRYPIEXPERIENCE.COM. I'M MOVING TO A DEDICATED DOMAIN - YOU'LL BE ABLE TO FIND ALL PREVIOUS CONTENT THERE, ALONG WITH NEW POSTS.

Thursday, 20 September 2012

Essentially what this means is you can get roughly 50% extra performance out of your Pi! It'll allow you to overclock the CPU to up to 1Ghz and while the Pi is cool enough it'll run at this level. If it overheats? Well, they've added a fail safe into the latest Rasbian - it'll fall back to a lower config:

And best of all, it's 100% endorsed by the foundation - you can do this without invalidating your warranty! So - try out the latest distro - you can find it here.

Monday, 20 August 2012

So a couple of you have been asking about getting VNC to start automatically (me included). I did a bit of digging and have figured out what to do - it's a few simple steps. First off though, must say thanks to Penguin Tutor for the actual answer to this issue.

So - I'm assuming that you have VNC up and running, working if you start it manually after each boot. If not, take a look here.

Create startup file
The first thing you need to do is create the file that will actually start VNC on startup. I'm doing this via Putty (instructions here), but you can just as easily use Terminal directly from the Pi.

Type the following:sudo nano /etc/init.d/tightvncserver

NOTE: nano is a lightweight editor - the command above will create a new file called tightvncserver in the /etc/init.d directory and open it for editing, presenting the following screen (note the [ New File ] entry at the bottom, indicating a new file):

Once you have the file open, paste in the following:

# First configure the user you want to run this under - this will generally be pi, unless you've created your own usersexport USER='pi'